How the Pirate Bay Was Dismembered

The Pirate Bay folks go to jail; the site went to the big cloud server in the sky.

In the interest of, ahem, academic research, I've noticed that what was once one of the world's largest torrent sites has been inoperational for two weeks now. The Pirate Bay, we hardly knew ye. Whatever your views are of torrent sites, it is always interesting to follow the cat-and-mouse game between the authorities--usually Western trade or intellectual property agencies acting on behalf of copyright holders--and the torrent sites. So the Pirate Bay is (was?) one of the largest torrent trackers. That said, there are literally dozens more out there which feature largely the same content. Why is it, then, that the Pirate Bay has succumbed rather easily? After all, aren't the Swedes a bunch of libertarian, Julian Assange-loving folks?

On 9 December, Swedish authorities mounted a rather large raid on the Pirate Bay's facilities:

However, over in Sweden authorities have just confirmed that local
police carried out a raid in Stockholm this morning as part of an
operation to protect intellectual property. “There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm.
This is in connection with violations of copyright law,” read a
statement from Paul Pintér, police national coordinator for IP
enforcement. Police are staying quiet on the exact location of the operation and
the targets involved but the fact that the national police IP chief is
involved at this early stage suggests something sizable.

In addition, expert file-sharing case prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad has
commented on the raid, further adding weight to the incident. “There were a number of police officers and digital forensics experts
there. This took place during the morning and continued until this
afternoon. Several servers and computers were seized, but I cannot say
exactly how many,” Ingblad told SR.

Some news from a few months back suggested the Pirate Bay acquired a greater degree of insulation from the authorities by migrating to cloud servers. Obviously, we now know that was not really the case. There has been a fairly large international dragnet to detain those affiliated with the Pirate Bay over the past few years. In terms of scale and scope, it strikes me as the cyber-equivalent of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad tracking down and terminating every Palestinian believed to be with the Black September group that kidnapped Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics, but I digress...

One by one the key players behind The Pirate Bay have been captured
by police and forced to complete jail sentences previously determined by
Swedish authorities. The most recently detained was Fredrik Neij, a key player in the
operations of The Pirate Bay right from the very early days of the site.

After realizing that his fate in Sweden involved a 10 month jail
sentence, Neij fled to Laos in Asia where he lived until recently with
this young family. He traveled from Laos into bordering Thailand on many
occasions but last month his luck ran out. On November 4, immigration police announced that Neij had been
detained while crossing the border into Nong Khai, a city in North-East
Thailand. What followed was a very public press conference in which a bewildered looking Neij was paraded before the media while flanked by several officers.

To no one's real surprise, the powers-that-be that have instigated, ah, tracking down the nefarious (or heroic depending on your point of view) TPB folks were major US media conglomerates:

But while the rest of the world had to wait until November 4 to hear
the news, leaked emails obtained by TorrentFreak show that the Hollywood
studios knew about things well in advance. In an email dated the day before Neij’s arrest was made public, the
MPAA advised chiefs at Disney, Paramount, Sony, Warner Bros, NBC
Universal and FOX of the Swede’s arrest. But things went deeper than
that.

Already there had been rumors in Thai media that “U.S. movie
companies” had hired a law firm to track down Neij and that a house on
the island of Phuket plus a bank account containing five million baht
($153,000) had been discovered. Emails seen by TF confirm the MPAA’s
involvement, but also that they didn’t want that noticed in public.

What are the lessons for torrent sites here based on the Pirate Bay's example? I think the most obvious one is that having servers located in the West is just plain stupid. Even in Sweden where they are relatively relaxed about IP and copyright--Swedes are generally laid-back people--American pressure likely resulted in the major action against the Pirate Bay's facilities. Kickass Torrents with its Somali domain notwithstanding, moving one's top-level domain (TLD) to exotic places like Sint Maarten or Ascension Island doesn't seem to help that much.

Since the Pirate Bay episode has put into question the ruse of moving to a "cloud server," I guess two possibilities remain: First, you can try to hide the location of these servers as best as you can. Witness the private tracker site Demonoid being resurrected when I thought it had bitten the dust a few years ago. True, activity hasn't been what it was before the long closure, but hey, it's still there and that counts for something. Second, you can base your servers where the long arm of American law can't reach you. Given Russia's "New Cold War" with the West, the irony of it all is that sites like Rutracker.org with much of its tracked content being served up to foreigners will have staying power. Sure you may be hit by the odd Ukranian DDOS attack, but those things usually blow over quite quickly.

Make no mistake: even in the so-called "digital age," there is no "death of distance" as geography still matters--for torrent sites, at least.